Much of the text which follows is from a document ('Topics 5') produced
on December 30th, 2002. It is a list of topics connected with
ancient religion which are what we might understand as a technical substratum to
religious thought. By this I mean something which underpins a number of ideas
which might be found elsewhere, and in some other form, in the textual remains,
but which is based on physical analogies with the properties and
attributes which were understood to have some connection with the Divine.
I will expand on the first three items on the list.
Things like the deliberate breaking of objects at a ritually
significant moment, before being thrown into the water at Flag Fen (a site in England of
great ritual importance in ancient times), might have depended on the association
of water with the Divine. This was an association which was made in a number of
cultures, including Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Persia, Egypt, in Israel, and in Greece. Why
this association? There are so many reasons, including the fact that water has
no form, no colour of its own, and is everywhere. It was conceived to surround
the world, and to signify abundance and generation.
The pursuit of distinctive excellences in design around the
Polynesian islands might have happened because of the notion that the
Divine can be understood as that which is the most excellent of things, and
that pursuing excellence in the design of ritual tattoo designs was therefore an
attempt to emulate one of the qualities of the Divine.
The alternation of open and closed lotuses in both Egyptian
and Assyrian designs, most often in the design of carpet edges and thresholds,
is usually treated simply as a matter of artistic design. But if the concept of
the Divine in Egypt and Assyria involved the idea that whatever the divine is,
it is necessarily at the edge of physical reality – at the limit of what
physical reality is, then we can understand the association between the
threshold and the alternating design, as a representation of the Divine as something
which necessarily embraces the possible states in which things can exist. In
the case of the lotuses, they can be open or closed, and at the limit of
physical reality, they are in both states. We know in the case of the ritual
for the inauguration of divine statues in Assyria, the ritual made special use
of thresholds during the process.
And so on.
I’d been pursuing this interest since 1991 or thereabouts.
There is a first outline of what became The Sacred History of Being from early
2003, which was worked up into chapters and sections, which were to deal with a
number of items in the list.
The actual draft which I worked on up to 2005
retained a number of elements of the outline, but it became clear that it was
an unworkable way to make the case I wanted to make, which was the idea that the
conception of a singular divinity lay somewhere behind the multiplicity of gods
in the ancient world. Too many cultures, and too much detail. I needed to do it some other way. I decided
that a detailed exploration of the technical substratum would wait, and that it
would be easier to discuss if the conception
of a singular divinity had already been explored.
Here is (an edited) version of the list -
-Flag Fen: pattern of distribution of ritual objects in the
lake/bog (broken/intact).
-Geographic array of excellences pursued by Polynesian
islands (tattooing, stone carving, etc).
-Decorative motifs in Near Eastern and Egyptian Art: the
alternation of open and closed lotus flowers.
-Decorative motifs in Near Eastern Art: the
corridor/infinite regression of doorways in altar design (see Mastaba).
-The Omphalos in Greece and Babylonia.
-The concept of the Boundary and the limit in antiquity
(Greece, the Near East, and Egypt).
-The concepts of the mean and the extreme in Greece.
-The concept of completion in antiquity (Greece, Egypt,
Assyria, Babylonia, Sumer, Persia).
-The concept of Kingship in Antiquity (Greece, Egypt,
Assyria, Babylonia, Sumer).
-The zoo in Assyria.
-The concept of the Museum in Greek Egypt and Assyria.
-The concept of the Library in Greece, Greek Egypt, Egypt,
Babylonia, Assyria, Sumer and Rome.
-The concept of fate in antiquity.
-The concept of ‘kairos’ or ‘right time’ in antiquity.
-The concepts of ‘the same’ and ‘the different’.
-The concepts of ‘the little more’ and ‘the little less’.
-The infinitely small and the infinitely great.
-The collection of augmentations and reduplications.
-Metaphor in antiquity.
-Metonymy in antiquity.
-Possession in antiquity (Assyria, Greece, Babylonia).
-The concept of sacred space in Greece, Egypt, Assyria,
Babylonia, and Sumer.
-The conception of the otherworld in Greece, Egypt, Assyria,
Babylonia, Sumer, Rome (etc).
-The conception of ‘reality’ in Greece, Egypt, Assyria,
Babylonia, Sumer, etc.
-The concept of virtue (excellence) among the Greeks (Athens
and Sparta).
-The concept of
virtue (excellence) among the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, and
Sumerians.
-Excellence and discipline in antiquity.
-The concept of ‘the other’ in antiquity.
-The listing of objects by their virtues (or accidental
characteristics) (Sumer)
-Accidental property or virtue?
-The concept of transcendence and the transcendent in
Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Greece and Sumer.
-The problem of transcendence in antiquity.
-Markers of the transcendent in antiquity.
-The pure and the impure (are priests pure or impure?)
-The problem of the priest.
-Hair and Nails (extremities).
-The concept of the foreign.
-The living and the dead (differences and similarities)
-Do statues live?
-The lives of statues.
-Movement and the inanimate
-Eternity (and the millions of years)
Gk ‘zoon’ (Hdt).
-Mastaba tomb to multiple mastaba tomb (pyramid)
(augmentation and reduplication)
-The conception of the Divine in Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia,
Persia, Sumer and Greece.
-Can a man become a god while alive?
-Can a man become a god at all?
-Divine honours in Greece and Persia.
-The Cult of the Great Gods
- Augmentation and reduplication (the emphatic in
antiquity).
-The pursuit of the Great.
-Airs, waters and places before Plato and Aristotle
(direction and geography in the ancient world).
-Loosing and Binding (Greece and Israel).
-High Places (Britain, Greece, Israel, Canaan).
-The temple as the Gods house.
-Filling the temple with gravel (Sumer) – completion.
-The puzzle of the palace and the temple.
-The King and the High Priest.
-The Shamanic aspects of King and Priest.
-The concept of the Soul in Greece and Egypt.
-The Pythia (old woman) wearing young woman’s clothes.
-Reduplication of social structures in Roman society
(consuls and tribunes, praetors and aediles).
-‘Consular Tribunes’
-The fabrication of Roman history (the 1st cent.
Filter)
-The Roman Arena – mythological guises for murder.
-Wrestling by grave a means of passage to the next world
(Greece, Rome).
-Ancestor worship (the past as the other in antiquity – Rome
and Polynesia).
-Hebrew emulation of Babylonian and Assyrian religious forms
and narrative.
-Hebrew inversions of Babylonian and Assyrian religious
forms (abandonment of the image).
-Cultures without professional priestly classes (Assyria,
Greece).
-Is Greece influenced by Egypt?
-Self-creation of Sparta and its military virtues.
-The evidence for early Sparta.
-The false door in Egypt
-proximity and touching (Egypt, Greece, Assyria, Babylonia,
Sumer).
-The idea of symbol in antiquity.
-The concept of the telos
-The idea of the telos in antiquity before Socrates
-‘Going before’.
-The joint in antiquity (China, Greece, etc).
-The concept of identity in antiquity.
-The concept of similarity in antiquity.
-The concept of discrete states (law of the excluded
middle).
-The wall (limit, boundary as proximity of the other).
-The text addressed to the gods.
- Addressing the gods in general.
-theology and history as emulation
-theology and history as dissimulation
-The Iiad and the Odyssey as Achaean documents.
-The Iliad and Odyssey in terms of art and artifice.
-The parallel lives of Greeks and Gods in the Iliad.
-The ordering of a theology by a poet (Homer).
-Theological assimilation (Greece, Assyria, Egypt,
Babylonia).
-The conception of the Good.
-The concept of the One.
-Concept of the Many.
-Concept of the cairn.
-The Tibetan prayer wheel.
-The contents of the Egyptian altar (bread, lotuses, etc).
-The ground of reality (ousia) and its properties
-The Golden Section (Golden Mean) as the abstraction.
- Alternative views of polytheism
- The numinous in antiquity.
- Rites of passage.
-Rites of communication.
-Varro’s analysis of the possible types of religious belief.
-Varro’s concept of ‘superstitio’.
-Religious theatre and Incarnation in antiquity.
-The Chinese Warriors (Terracotta Army).
-The Parmenidean Hypothesis.
-The damnation of the Parmenidean hypothesis (by Parmenides)
in Plato’s account.
-The Democritean account of reality an alternative to the
Parmenidean, or a subset?
Thomas Yaeger, March 30, 2018.
Thanks for sharing thhis
ReplyDeleteAnd thanks for noticing this piece of text. This gave me a baseline for composing the second draft of 'The Sacred History of Being'. It also illuminates a lot of things which are just ignored by modern scholars of the ancient world. Best, TY.
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